Now that Bing and Google will be displaying tweets from Twitter and status messages from Facebook, web workers will need to consider how much, and how publicly, we wish to interact with these two social networks.
Twitter
If you’re like I am, your Twitter stream is probably public. For me, the value of Twitter is its ability to let me share news and comments that current and potential clients may find useful. I also use it as a way of interacting with clients if our regular communication channels are down.
So I certainly don’t say anything using @chcs (my company Twitter account) that can’t be public. I also have a personal Twitter feed, @HamiltonChas, that mostly focuses on my comments regarding local politics. I also tweet using @GrowTrains, an account that reflects my interest in improving passenger train service. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: bing, brizzly, Facebook, facebook groups, facebook pages, google, hootsuite, nambu, oneriot, personal branding, tweetdeck, twitter, twitter search
Some big news yesterday was the announcement of the Bing/Twitter/Facebook deals that will see the three services sharing info and working together in all kinds of interesting ways. One of those ways has now gone live, and it’s Microsoft’s Bing Twitter search. It looks a little like Twitter Search, only better, and much more broadly useful.
What do I mean by that? Well, for one, you have Twitter’s trending topics, but more than the 10 you normally see, and they’re arranged in a tag cloud. I also noticed that some from the official Twitter search page aren’t actually present, but it looks like it’s cut out the hashtagged, frivolous stuff, and left the more meaty subjects. Read the rest of this entry »
I noted with interest that Microsoft has announced a new feature in its Bing search engine, focused on visual searches. You can try it here (note that it requires you to have Silverlight installed). Like some of the dedicated visual search engines, it presents a way to do web searches by clicking through collected visual images, instead of entering keywords. Initially, it’s only available for certain types of search categories.
To perform searches, you start with a category such as “Digital Cameras,” where a search will present you with a large tapestry of individual photos of camera; a portion of the digital camera-related results is shown below. Clicking on any camera in the tapestry will take you to dedicated search results for that camera. This seems, in particular, to be a good search metaphor for, say, shopping for tech products online, where the look of the product might matter a lot to you. For general use, though, there are some other visual search engines that I favor.
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Have you been using Microsoft’s (and now Yahoo’s) new Bing search engine in conjunction with Google for searches? I have, partly because of the novelty, and partly because Bing does a few interesting things that Google doesn’t, including good natural language searches. Webware has published an interesting roundup of a slew of mashup applications designed to let you perform Bing and Google searches simultaneously, with, in some cases, dual-paned views of search results. These include CompareGoogle and Google-Bing, but the most useful one appears to be Bing vs. Google. It gives you a dual-paned view of results from both search engines, and has some shortcomings, but while using it I got a better sense than ever of what Bing and Google, respectively, are good at.
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Lately, many people have been experimenting with Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine offering, which we covered here. I agree with the many people who are noting improvements that need to arrive in Bing, such as blog searching and more varied search results for basic keywords. However, not everyone realizes that Bing is built on a powerful search engine technology from an open source-focused company that Microsoft acquired last year: Powerset. As I covered in this post, the Powerset technology underlying Bing introduces some powerful features that many people aren’t trying. You may find them useful.
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Windows Live Search didn’t go over too well with the online masses. Few, if any, moved from search industry leader (that’s an understatement) Google. I remember the worst part about doing a fresh Windows install was changing IE’s defaults from Microsoft’s Live services, and replacing Live Search with Google as the default search engine was first priority. So how does new search offering Bing stack up, especially from a web working point of view? You may have already formed your own opinion, but here’s my take.
Basic Search
Before looking at some of its more advanced features, let’s compare it in terms of a straight-up, simple keyword search on a subject close to my heart. Finding information on Apple is a part of my job, and I run Apple-related searches on an hourly basis, if not even more frequently, over the course of the day. Read the rest of this entry »
Now that Bing and Google will be displaying tweets from Twitter and status messages from Facebook, web workers will need to consider how much, and how publicly, we wish to interact with these two social networks.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
